BEYOND THE PILOT: SCALING GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE TOWARD NETWORK INTEGRATION IN CLEVELAND'S GRAY-GREEN STORMWATER SYSTEM
Cleveland, Ohio, operates one of the most ambitious gray storm water infrastructure programs in the United States. Project Clean Lake, commits the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) to eliminating combined sewer overflows through a network of deep underground storage tunnels engineered for extreme storm events. At the same time, Cleveland has invested in parallel surface-level green infrastructure that operate in a fundamentally different hydraulic register: the frequent, moderate rainfall events governing everyday life. This paper argues that the barrier to a coherent green infrastructure network in Cleveland is not technical or financial; it is a governance gap. Cleveland lacks the shared spatial framework, co-benefit performance metrics, and institutional architecture capable of deploying green infrastructure at a network scale using the most tractable land resource available: the thousands of vacant parcels held by the Cuyahoga Land Bank and the City of Cleveland across the city'. These parcels are already publicly controlled, cleared for beneficial reuse, and concentrated in precisely the neighborhoods where co-benefit need is highest. The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with practitioners; analysis of Project Clean Lake program documents and Big Creek Tunnel coordination materials; and a spatial network analysis of existing GI installations against socioeconomic vulnerability and vacant land availability. It introduces network coherence as the evaluative standard for GI integration, develops a three-model comparison of gray infrastructure, the Metroparks partnership, and a proposed vacant land GI network as its central analytical contribution.